Articles: Teaching & Learning

The healthcare industry is in flux. As more Americans acquire insurance, providers are moving towards an integrated care model with doctors, nurses and social workers, working in coordinated teams. “Traditionally, all the different professionals in healthcare have been stuck in their own silos.

The blended classroom is no longer the exception, with the majority of universities integrating online learning into nearly every department. Despite the whirlwind innovations in online pedagogy, there has been a much slower race to online assessment.

University of Pennsylvania was one of Coursera’s first four partners, having started its open course initiative in April 2012. Today, it offers 25 courses from 10 of its 12 schools, and has logged 1.9 million enrollments.

It used to be that homework was done at home, and classes were devoted to lectures and discussions. But now, thanks to new tech solutions like podcasting and screencasting, university instructors are “flipping” their classroom.

The University of Central Florida is the second-largest university in the U.S., with 12 campuses serving 60,000 students. Keystone College, on the other hand, a small, private, liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, is on the other end of the spectrum, with just 2,000 students.